The Creative Power of Misfits

ADAM: What’s your favorite movie?

KIDS: One of them is Wreck it Ralph.

ADAM: And another?

KIDS: Mr. Peabody and Sherman.

My kids have seen a lot of cartoons.

KIDS: A lot! On the TV and in the movie theater!

My wife and I love animated films too. When we were growing up, there was only one name in animated movies: Disney. For about six decades they were pretty much the only game in town. By the mid-90s, Disney films had started to follow a formula: they would take an old story, add a few musical numbers, and voila: Pocahontas, Hercules, Mulan. But then something new happened in animation.

CLIP: To infinity and beyond!

Pixar reinvented how you make an animated movie. Instead of drawing characters, you code them on a computer—which makes them come alive in 3D, instead of being flat and 2-dimensional. I’m sure you remember Pixar’s first computer-animated movie: Toy Story. 

CLIP: There’s a snake in my boot!

And it was a smash. Not just because the tech was cool, but also because the story was fresh.

BRAD: it was just so vivid and funny and the characters were original

This is Brad Bird. He’s a writer, animator and director.

BRAD: They weren't doing the ten songs, and all that stuff that was getting very standard in animation at the time.

Pixar’s first three films got multiple Oscar nominations. They grossed over $1 billion. The studio was a perfectly calibrated hit machine. And that’s when they made a strange decision: they hired Brad. He was coming off a big project that tanked—and it wasn’t his first failure.

BRAD: I got fired from Disney and I was actually fired from two of the first three jobs I held.

But Pixar saw promise in Brad. He came to the studio with a bold vision for a new film, and he didn’t recruit the star teams who had created their earlier hits. Instead, he deliberately assembled a band of Pixar’s biggest misfits.

BRAD: Black sheep.

JOHN: Disgruntled.

NICOLE: I say pirate.

It doesn’t exactly sound like a dream team. But somehow, the movie they made together grossed over $600 million, won two Oscars, and was Pixar’s biggest hit yet. It was… incredible. 

CLIP: Incredible...Incredible...Incredible...

The critics loved it almost as much as my kids did.

KIDS: Again! Again! Again

I’m Adam Grant, and this is WorkLife, my podcast with TED. I’m an organizational psychologist. I study how to make work not suck. In this show, I’m inviting myself inside the minds of some truly unusual people, because they’ve mastered something I wish everyone knew about work.

Today: shakeups, and the value of the outsiders inside your workplace.

Thanks to Bonobos for sponsoring this episode.

(This is the transcript of season 2 episode 1, with sources linked. If you’re thinking about gathering a podcast club—it’s like a book club, only for podcasts—you can find discussion questions at the bottom. Listen on Apple devices here, or on other devices here.)

What’s the best time to shake things up?

 In most workplaces, it happens when you’re struggling. When the chips are down, you’re desperate— and you have nothing to lose by taking some risks. But by then, it’s often too late: you don’t have the resources to run bold experiments.

The evidence suggests that the best time to shake things up is actually when you’re doing well. That’s when you have the time, energy, and freedom to innovate. But sadly, research shows that success often makes us complacent. Experts call it the fat cat syndrome.

Think about a time when you’ve been at the top of your game. did you really want to embrace something radically different? Of course not! you probably became overconfident in your recipe and resistant to trying new things.

Take Blockbuster video. At one point they were apparently opening a new store every 17 hours. So they didn’t see any reason to buy a little mail-order company called Netflix. Oops.

One day the CEO of a successful company gave me that line I hate: “But that’s the way we’ve always done it.”

My answer? Blockbuster. Blackberry. Polaroid. Toys R’Us. Do you want me to keep going?

So how do you shake things up before it’s too late? For that, we’re going to the movies. In 1999, Warner Bros released the first animated movie directed by Brad Bird, Iron Giant.

JOHN: I remember being so excited about it.

This is Brad’s producer, John Walker. It was the first big project for both Brad and John. On opening day, John went to see it in a big theater in Times Square.

JOHN: And there were three people in there! I went, what the heck is going on? And so I spent the rest of the day just hanging around in front of the marquee, and whenever anybody would come by and look at the poster I'd go, “It's a really good movie. I'll buy your tickets!” I probably bought ten people tickets to see it, because there was no one in the theaters! It was empty, empty. It was just sad. I thought, “Oh God, that's the end of me. I’ll have the Iron Giant on my resumé and nothing more.”

The film failed commercially—but it was wildly original, and the leaders at Pixar saw potential there. So Brad Bird and John Walker got the call from two of the studio’s co-founders: Ed Catmull and Steve Jobs.

JOHN: They go, you know, “We'll bring this bacteria in from the outside and see if it grows in the petri dish.”

BRAD: They were actively choosing a guy to come up who had just made a big flop.

Pixar was founded on a disruptive vision. Their leaders fervently believed it was never too early to throw your own recipe out the window. Steve Jobs wanted to keep raising the bar—bigger hits, longer run times—so he picked a couple of outsiders to drive a shakeup.

BRAD: They were feeling like we're in danger of falling into certain habits, because we have the same group that are doing things, and we are very proud of this group and this group is very talented, but we want to shake things up. And they felt like whatever I was going to do, it was going to be different.

JOHN: And so they said, okay well here: "Can you guys do it? Can you do it in half the time half the money?"

They gave the answer you’d probably give if Steve Jobs had asked you that question.

JOHN: "Well sure we can!" You just you just say you can, right? And then you try to go figure out how to do it.

So Pixar hired John Walker and Brad Bird. Brad had been working on a new story for an animated film. It would be called The Incredibles. And it was different than anything Pixar had ever done.

BRAD: Everything that the film was all the things that CG animation was then terrible at. It was full of humans, which—they were the weakest thing in CG animation, if you look at humans circa that time.

Pixar films had only had humans as minor characters—and they didn't look very convincing. To date, Pixar’s movies were mostly filled with toys, monsters, and talking bugs. Brad was pitching a movie that would require animating a whole family of not just humans—humans with super-powers.

BRAD: It was full of water, and fire, and wind, and all this stuff that CG animation was no good at doing. Hair!

It turns out hair was a real problem. Prior to The Incredibles, no one had even bothered to code long hair because it was just impossible in CG animation.

BRAD: It's almost like everybody used a ton of hairspray before they got filmed because the hair doesn't move much, and we were doing a film where it was part of Violet's character.

Violet is a member of The Incredibles family—a shy, moody teenager.

CLIP: “Normal? What do you know about normal? What does anyone in this family know about normal?”

She was supposed to spend a huge part of the film covering her face with her long black hair.

JOHN: We'd seen these beautiful tests. And it was like, “Wow! She's shaking her head, and the hair is flowing, and it's gorgeous, and it's going to be beautiful.”

But the tests were oversimplified. The hair moved right, but looked like strips of rubber. When it was time to do the full computer animation, Violet’s hair looked awful. So John asked what it would take to get it right, and he was shocked at the answer.

JOHN: “We can't actually do the movie like that. That would take, you know, ten years and $10 million!” “Then why did you show us that?!” I was going to… I'm trying to get myself ready to go tell Brad that we're going to cut Violet's hair…

BRAD: You can't do it! That’s the character, she’s gotta have the hair! As the film goes on, she feels enough growing self-assurance that she pulls the hair out of her out of her face. Her hair had a story arc.

To do hair and water and all these other new images correctly, Pixar execs guessed that the film could cost half a billion dollars and take a decade to make. Brad needed some original thinking. So this unconventional director went looking for a team of unconventional recruits. The outsiders among Pixar’s insiders. The black sheep.

BRAD: They're not always the smilingest, easiest people to work with. Sometimes they're a little grumpy.

ADAM: Have you ever been a black sheep yourself?

BRAD: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. My family was kind of like the family in Incredibles. We had these dinners where everybody kind of vented, and kind of said what they thought. That’s the attitude I kinda grew up in. And I found very quickly the world doesn't work that way.

Brad searched Pixar’s ranks for people who were frustrated with the status quo—people who had risky ideas that had been dismissed or overlooked. You might have one of those people on your team. Or maybe you’re the black sheep.

BRAD: There's a big impetus, especially with success, to repeat whatever has worked before. You know: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But I was looking for a bunch of people that were kinda dissatisfied with the way things were.

It turns out Brad was onto something. Research shows that the kind of frustration he harnessed can fuel creativity. In other words: the curmudgeons on your team could be great untapped resources.

I’m sure you’ve seen companies hire external consultants or executives to shake things up. But there’s evidence that you don’t have to turn to outside hires. You can go to the black sheep already working within the company.

Consider one study that was done at a company that makes oil drilling equipment. Supervisors evaluated how often employees brought new and innovative ideas to the table. The employees who were rated the most creative were the ones who felt dissatisfied with their jobs. Their frustration with problems motivated them to develop fresh solutions.

But… dissatisfaction didn’t always lead to creativity. It only helped when people felt committed to the company—and had access to the feedback and support they needed. When you ignore them, disgruntled people channel their frustration in unproductive or even counterproductive directions. If you’re aware they’re out there, though, and you really listen to them, they can become your allies.

LISA: They always say innovation is the pirate ship that sails into the yacht club. Nobody likes it, but then they appreciate it later.

This is Lisa Bodell. She spent part of her career in advertising and startups.

LISA: and I came there to do really great, motivating, inspiring things, and I was spending my day just managing processes and procedures and crap.  

Lisa got fed up with the dozens of meaningless tasks that define so many work environments. So she started a company called futurethink to help organizations shake up the status quo.

CLIP: And ideally walk away with things that will help you simplify your work, and your life, to get you moving forward. And what I thought we could do is go through, I dunno, about 500 PowerPoint slides. Does that work for you all? No? [laughter]

Her big breakthrough came when she was giving a talk to a few dozen executives at a manufacturing company.

LISA: I realized quickly that these people didn't give a crap about what I was talking about, and so I called a break, and I said, “Listen, I'm gonna shake things up.”

She looked at all these bored executives and told them to kill their own company.

LISA: I challenged each of those groups to identify who their number one competitor was. And then I said, Pretend you are that competition. Pretend you have that hat on. I want you to put yourself out of business.” I mean, just the room lit on fire. They were so excited because I gave them permission to talk about the things that were literally verboten. It was a mindset shift as well as a business strategy shift.

When I heard about the exercise, I was expecting a room full of complaints and cynicism. Then I watched it happen—and I’ve never seen a more energized group of leaders in my life.

LISA: Really what it does is give people a framework and permission to start attacking things that aren't working, and that's what's energizing to people, is that… they don't know the difference, Adam, between being in a groove and being in a rut. And most people, when you talk about complacency, are in a rut—until you talk to them about “What do you wish you could change? Why are you frustrated?” They get pumped up!

ADAM: One thing that's always fascinated me about this exercise is how different it would be if you ran it as “save the company.” And I was interested in hearing what led you to the boldness of killing the company rather than saving the company.

LISA: Save means safe and preserve. You know, I think of a life preserver. “How can we keep what we have safe?” vs. “How can we get rid of what we have and do things better?” It's permission to admit that things might not be right, so you can look at what's not working and make space for things that are.

If you were asked to kill your company, where would you start? You might begin the way Lisa does. Gather some people together to give their frustration a voice. Put them on offense, not defense, by asking them to attack the problems they see. And then invite them to run with their best ideas.

Lisa’s approach has worked in all kinds of environments: banks, tech companies, city governments, schools. And Brad Bird did his own version of it at Pixar.

BRAD: Pixar kinda invented a lot of this stuff that that now everyone takes for granted. They were the best in the world at it. Those methods weren't going to work for our film.

Brad challenged the black sheep to try different solutions to their toughest animation problems. Like Violet’s hair.

BRAD: They don't want to do something the way that it's always been done. For every 20 people that say, “This is how you do it,” there's usually one person going, “Well, you don't have to do it that way. There's another way that you could do it.”

But there was one problem that neither Brad nor John Walker had anticipated.

JOHN: They were all in different rooms. They were doing different things.

The technical people had been unleashed to build all these new tools, but the creative people didn’t really understand how to use them.

JOHN: Something would go wrong. An email would come from one side going “hey your simulator is broken” over to the people that were building the simulator, and the simulator guys would write back, “No no no no. It's operator error,” and it would go back and forth like that, and we go, "Oh God, this is not working.”

Brad and John started listening to the people on the front lines. and they suddenly realized there was a simple solution to their complex problem: put the technical people together with the animators in the same rooms.

JOHN: As soon as that started to happen it was like magic, because, you know, somebody would show them the problem and say ,"Look what happens: I do this, and the hair flies around the room." And the guy who is building it goes, "Well you got to hit, you know, F3 dash seven and put this little bit of the code in there. Didn't you know that?” And they'd go, "No, we didn't know that!"

BRAD: The beautiful thing when you go after black sheep, and you say, “Hey I'll give your crazy idea a try,” that's kind of where they want to go!

ADAM: So wait, Brad, does that mean that you’re just trying to surround yourself constantly with angry people?

BRAD: No! I don’t want just disgruntled people. There are plenty of those and they don’t do a damn thing for anybody. I want people who are disgruntled because they have a better way of doing things and they are having trouble finding an avenue. Racing cars that are just spinning their wheels in a garage rather than racing. You open that garage and, man, those people take you somewhere.

So you’ve got your team of dissatisfied people. you’re ready for them to shake things up. Now how do you get them all innovating in the same direction?

[Ad break]

When you’re gathering a group of people for a major shakeup, how do you motivate them? Your first instinct is probably to inspire them.

APOLLO 13 CLIP: We never lost an American in space, we’re sure as hell not gonna lose one on my watch! Failure is not an option!

ELIZABETH CLIP: Let them come with the armies of hell, they will not pass!

WATERBOY CLIP: You can do it!

if you’re working with a bunch of disgruntled black sheep, you’ll feel especially compelled to convey confidence, show enthusiasm, and make sure they don’t get discouraged by the sheer difficulty of the task. But if you’re Brad Bird and you’re making The Incredibles, you do the exact opposite. Brad told his team no one thought they could pull it off.

NICOLE: That's the kind of challenge that lights a fuse in Brad—and that's how he leads our teams.

This is Nicole Paradis Grindle. She’s been a producer at Pixar since the mid-90s. When Nicole joined The Incredibles team, they had been struggling with the animation for about a year.

NICOLE: I was working with the engineers who were trying to figure out how to do the hair and the cloth, and they were saying it was impossible. Brad was asking for too much, and they just kept saying, “Nope, nope, nope we can't do it.” And they were trying, and the stuff they were producing looked terrible. We have these crew meetings once a week, so everyone's wandering in first thing in the morning with their coffee, piling into this big theater that we have. And he gets up in front of this room of people and he just starts yelling and telling them, “They think we can't do this. They think we're too slow. They think we're not good enough... I tell you we're going to do this!” You know, and people love it. I mean it's this pep rally. 

What Brad did by instinct is actually backed by evidence. If you want to motivate black sheep, give them a battle to fight… a particular kind of battle.

BRAD One thing that is very effective is to find a common enemy. But the enemy doesn't have to be a person. It can be a mindset. It can be a presumption. It can be a system that doesn't want to change. It can even be something like a trend in movies that is just making movies stupider. You can make that the enemy, and you can put it up in front of people and say, “You know what I don't like? I don't like X, and here's how I think we can not do this thing that everyone is doing, and really dazzle the audience.” And people like that, because you're— you're putting them on the pirate ship. You know, you're not going with the well-funded safe routes. You're kind of striking your sails in a storm and you're okay with it. And that fires people up. It fires me up!

SAMIR: It sounds like in that moment Brad was shaping how his team perceived those outside of their team, and basically framed those individuals as critics or naysayers.

This is Samir Nurmohamed, my colleague at Wharton. He studies what happens when we’re cast in the role of underdog.

SAMIR: Stories of underdogs and favorites permeate societies: David versus Goliath, Horatio Alger, Ivan the Fool in Russian literature. You see these examples of underdogs going from rags to riches or performing against others’ low expectations across the world.

An underdog isn’t a kind of person. It’s a mindset that can help you approach problems the way black sheep do. You can position people as underdogs by telling them they’re not expected to succeed. and surprisingly, the uphill battle is often the one that people are most excited to fight.

In a study with job seekers who had faced discrimination in their careers, Samir randomly assigned some of them to tell a story about how they had been underdogs against the odds. It almost doubled their chances of landing a job in the following month.

SAMIR: You actually experience more efficacy and more confidence to do well, and it leads to higher performance.

In another study, Samir had people fill out a survey about their negotiating style. Then he told them that based on their results, he had calculated the probability of their success in a negotiation. He told some participants they were the favorites, some they were evenly matched, and told others that they were the underdogs.

SAMIR: The underdog actually ended up reaching the more creative solution. People who were told that they couldn't succeed actually ended up performing better, and the reason for this is essentially that they essentially wanted to prove the researchers wrong.

The favorites had nothing to prove; they got complacent. The underdogs were driven to show they had been misjudged—which happens in all kinds of jobs. Even Michael Jordan motivated himself this way.

SAMIR: Even in his Hall of Fame induction speech, when the world came out to celebrate with him, he was calling out his school coach who chose another player over him, and how this fueled his motivation to prove them wrong. What's remarkable is that Jordan was talking about being underestimated after being universally recognized as not only the greatest basketball player ever but as one of the greatest athletes of all time. Jordan was still constructing that perception of being underestimated—and using that as motivation to prove others wrong.

But before you start cutting down all your colleagues in the name of motivation, keep in mind that there’s a wrong way to do it.

SAMIR: This doesn't mean you go around the workplace telling everyone that they can't succeed. That's not the way to instill this motivation. As an underdog you have to feel like you have the capabilities to succeed.

For the underdog approach to work, the low expectations need to come from the right messenger—a natural adversary.

SAMIR: When a really credible person tells you you can't succeed, in some sense you basically internalize those expectations. Your confidence drops. You actually believe them, and you don't perform as successfully. On the other hand, when you receive low expectations from someone who's not seen as credible, you perceive them as not knowledgeable about either the domain that you're performing in or your own abilities. This is what sparks that desire to prove others wrong.

So if you’re rallying salespeople, you could emphasize that R&D doesn’t think they can hit their targets. And if you’re trying to motivate technical or creative people, you can tell them they’re being doubted by a bunch of suits.

NICOLE: That's what those black sheep probably are looking for is an opportunity to show what they can do.

Pixar producer Nicole Grindle saw Brad’s underdog gambit pay off. The black sheep at the studio felt the naysayers had no business judging their abilities—or the new animation techniques they were about to invent.

NICOLE: The idea that we're proving folks wrong I think is the prime motivator. Of course we want to make a great film and a great story, and that's a given, but proving that—you know, proving to the man that we're better than they think we are—that's exciting, and that's what folks in this industry live to do is, you know, act in that kind of a story.

The last step for energizing your shakeup team is to calibrate the degree of difficulty. How challenging should the goal be?

BRAD: I think you always have the impossible task, because basically to do really good work is hard, and if you're doing it right you are kind of an underdog. You should be shooting for something that's out of reach, and maybe you don't hit it. But at the end of it, if you are reaching for something that's beyond your reach, you're probably going to extend your reach from your previous work.

In psychology, we call that kind of reach a just manageable difficulty. It’s a challenge that tests and stretches your skills to the very edge of what you think is possible. It has to be tough—but it can’t set you up for certain failure, either. As Pixar producer John Walker puts it:

JOHN: Sometimes you have to swim upstream. But if you swim upstream too long, something is probably wrong.

OK, I came away from Pixar convinced that to shake things up, it can help to recruit the people you’d least expect—frustrated people—and listen to them. Then motivate them by making them into underdogs against the odds, or a difficult enemy. But i was curious about whether this could all work in a place that’s the total opposite of Pixar: the ultimate bureaucracy. An environment where strict orders are followed, old traditions crush new technologies, and creativity isn’t just not rewarded—it’s sometimes actively punished.

CLIP: Recruit training, where a man is taught the basic skills for the sea.

The U.S. Navy.

CLIP: He learns to be a part of the team; he learns where he might fit in.

A few years ago, a military general told me that if I wanted to understand innovation in the armed forces, I had to talk to a junior Naval officer named Ben Kohlmann.

BEN: My grandfather was a World War II aviator, and my great uncle was an Air Force pilot who was shot down over Vietnam and spent five years in the Hanoi Hilton with John McCain and Jim Stockdale. And those stories infused my upbringing. I wanted to be leading carrier battle fleets against whoever was attacking the United States.

So I was surprised to hear Ben’s colleagues call him a black sheep. A rabble rouser. A troublemaker.

BEN: Troublemaker is an amusing term for me and I think my parents would get a kick out of that.

ADAM: Do you think you are one, though—or became one in the Navy?

BEN: I think I became a troublemaker in the sense of challenging established wisdom

Ben may have been a sailor, but he didn’t start out as a pirate.

BEN: I was in a fraternity that was known for its parties, but was the guy doing risk management on the outside making sure nothing too crazy went down.

Ben became a Naval aviator, just like the pilots in Top Gun. Their call signs were Maverick and Iceman.

BEN: My call sign was Professor, because I had this habit of reading long books like The American History of Law and listening to classical music.

When Ben flew missions as a naval pilot, he had a huge amount of autonomy.

BEN: Being a 27-year-old who's leading two $65 million jets with, you know, four or five hundred-pound bombs, this is an incredible amount of responsibility on a daily basis. You were the on-scene commander.

But when Ben came back from overseas deployment, he started getting frustrated. Frustrated that people were getting rewarded based on seniority instead of performance. Frustrated that people were getting promoted for conformity instead of original thinking. Frustrated that a field-tested combat pilot couldn’t even have a beer on a Friday night without seeking approval from a senior commander.

BEN: You know, there's five or six levels of approval. Even if the first four people say yes, it only takes one veto to kill an idea. And so that becomes very discouraging, and you stop caring to some extent.

So Ben wrote an essay for a military news site. He explained his frustration—and challenged the Navy to start supporting and promoting junior people with disruptive ideas. Piping up like that is… sorta not done in the military.

BEN: I said some pretty intemperate things, when reflecting on it. But it got the attention of a lot of senior officials who were aghast that I would write something like this.

But some leaders were open to Ben’s perspective. A Navy admiral was setting up something called a rapid innovation cell—and he asked Ben to direct it.

Now to give you a sense for how slowly the Navy adopts new technologies, some of their computers are still running Windows 95. Yet over the next year, Ben’s rapid innovation cell succeeded in getting 3D printers installed on ships. They also tested a robot fish, affectionately named Silent Nemo, for stealth underwater missions. (It looks like a tuna, in case you’re wondering.)

Ben fueled these advances with the same strategies we saw at Pixar. His first step was to recruit black sheep. Many of them had been disciplined for insubordination—like one guy who was fired from a nuclear submarine for disobeying an order.

BEN: And ended up being one of the key innovation catalysts.

ADAM: How did you find them? And was that a signal that you were deliberately looking for? Let me just find a bunch of people who are pissed off?

BEN: If you had the guts and the willingness to put your name on to an idea and publish it, that already set you apart from the crowd. And disrupters—while they're lone wolves to some extent—they also find each other, whether it's in the cubicle next door or the building across the way or even across the country.

Second, Ben gathered them together to really listen to their frustrations, rather than squash them.

BEN: One of the phrases that really makes me angry is when senior leaders say, “If you have a problem, don't tell it to me unless you have a solution.” Oftentimes junior people have lots of problems they don't know the solutions to, and they need guidance. This is untapped energy just waiting to be unleashed.

And third, Ben rallied them around a common enemy. In this case, middle managers.

BEN: You have this mismatch between senior officers who really and truly wanted the crazy ideas, with those below them who had a mandate to slow those things down. And if we didn't get their approval, then we just jumped ahead of them to their senior who usually was in our favor. And you can use the bureaucracy against itself in this sense, because people will always fall in line.

In Ben’s view, the lasting impact of his work was in demonstrating that this kind of innovation could be fueled from the bottom up by black sheep inside the Navy. They planted seeds for dozens of other rapid innovation cells across the military.

BEN: And so for me, the greatest success is the mindset that it created within a very bureaucratic organization to take charge, to empower people to run with an idea, and build a community of support around that—and do it regardless of whether or not you had official support.

Alright, as much as I love this whole recipe, I have one little problem with it: you can only use it once. If you succeed, people aren’t underdogs anymore. That was Brad Bird’s big challenge when it came time to make a sequel to The Incredibles. This time, the team was stacked with hit-makers. There was no common enemy, and they had three years to make the film.

ADAM: It seems like it would have been harder to frame the crew as underdogs given how remarkably successful the original movie was.

BRAD: Except that they took a year off of our schedule and suddenly we’re the underdogs again. We had a hell of a mountain to climb that in many ways was taller than our first one.

NICOLE: The studio asked us to release the film a year earlier than what we had originally planned. A year is a lot. We tried to reestablish that underdog theme, and taking a year off the schedule sure helped.

That’s one way to turn superstars into underdogs again! But to make it work, the new challenge has to be meaningful or exciting—not just an arbitrary burden.

BRAD: You know, there's an attitude out there of—a bunch of people with their arms folded, like, “This better be good”—you know, which doesn't help inspire you to do anything good. You know, what is challenging is, “Can you take a year off the schedule and still come out with a great movie and come in on or under budget and, you know, drop the mic?”

The team had the fuel they needed. It became a just manageable difficulty. Incredibles 2 grossed over $1 billion in its first two months alone, eclipsing the original film’s total theatrical revenues. It was nominated for an Oscar and won the People’s Choice Award for favorite family movie.

BRAD: Yes, it’s cool for adults and kids!

That’s what a bunch of black sheep can do. And, oh yeah, it’s now the highest-grossing animated film in American history. Most importantly, it got six thumbs up from my favorite experts.

ADAM: What was the first thing you said when we came out of the theater?

KIDS: I want to see it again and again.

ADAM: How many times have you seen it?

KIDS: Uh, four?

ADAM: You’ve seen it four times?

KIDS: I think.

ADAM: Why?

KIDS: Because I like it... I think it was twice in the same week.

CREDITS: WorkLife is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by TED with Transmitter Media.Our team includes Colin Helms, Gretta Cohn, Jessica Glazer, Grace Rubenstein, Angela Cheng, and Janet Lee. This episode was produced by Dan O’Donnell. Our show is mixed by Rick Kwan. Original music by Hahnsdale Hsu and Allison Layton Brown. Ad stories produced by Pineapple Street Media.

Special thanks to our sponsors: Bonobos, Accenture, Hilton, and JPMorgan Chase & Co. Thanks to Bob Sutton for alerting us to the Incredibles story, and Jamie Woolf, Chris Wiggum, Rick Sayre, Alan Barillaro, and Greg Brandeau for sharing their perspectives and helping with interviews at Pixar, as well as Rich Walsh in the military. For their research, Jing Zhou and Jennifer George on dissatisfaction fueling creativity, Sim Sitkin and colleagues on stretch goals, and Jane Dutton and Bob Duncan on the fat cat syndrome.

Next time, on WorkLife:

AMY: We finished, and I hear Shalane go, “That was hard. I taste blood.” And then she goes, “That's so awesome.” I was like, “You know what? I’m going to find out exactly what I’m made of here.”

Olympic rivals, and pretty good friends too. We’ll explore how to get the best of both worlds…

KIDS: Bleep bloop bleep. Daddy, I’m in your studio! Is that a microphone? I’m Adam Grant and I have no hair! And my podcast is great!

DISCUSSION GUIDE

1. Who are the outsiders inside your workplace, and how can you make sure they feel heard?

2. When things are going well, what can you do to avoid the fat cat syndrome?

3. What steps can you take to make sure that people are able to surface problems even if they don’t know the solution?

4. If you were going to run Lisa Bodell’s “kill the company” exercise, where would you start?

5. In your job, who are the people working in silos who might benefit from being in the same room—like the technical people and animators at Pixar?

6. Has anyone who lacks credibility ever doubted you—and if so, have you used that as motivation? How can you draw on that experience to position yourself as an underdog?

7. Who is your team’s common enemy?

8. Who would you put in a rapid innovation cell—and which open-minded leader would you want to oversee it?

9. How do you know when you have a just manageable difficulty, rather than one that’s impossible?

10. If there was a podcast episode about shakeups in your workplace, what insights would it highlight?